Are You Ready To Go Quantum?

We can’t stop progress much more that related to technology. The things we have now were only a dream to many ten to twenty years ago. And look how far the human race has come. While we continue to enjoy all the perks offered by technology (and perhaps not love the drawbacks – http://www.harddriverecovery.org/ms-exchange-data-recovery.html) to us, there is more waiting for everyone and we can’t stop it from coming.

We may be blown away by the technology we now use but are you prepared to take things to the next level? The future of computing is quantum. And that’s the direction experts in the field are taking us. While you’ve probably heard the term “quantum” back as a student, it is something you need to reorient yourself with because it is the future that is waiting for all of us.

Nothing has changed the world more than our ability to compute. A large fraction of the global population now carries up to a billion transistors in their pockets, and universal internet access is rapidly following. Every business is soon to be an information business, as I’m reminded while running in the countryside, where even farming is being transformed. Livestock are being equipped with sensors to monitor their health remotely, and a farmer’s decisions on what crop to plant when, as well as how much to irrigate and fertilise, are increasingly based not just on weather forecasts but also on complex computational models making market and economic predictions.

The good news is that a solution is at hand — a drastically different approach to computing that is profound both in terms of the fundamental laws of physics it exploits, and the transformations it will bring about in our lives, society and economy. At their most basic level, conventional computers represent each “bit” of information — the logical zero or one — in the on-off state of a transistor. But by exercising careful control over some of the smallest constituents of our universe, quantum computers instead work with “qubits”. A standard bit can only exist in the zero or the one state, whereas a qubit can adopt a uniquely quantum superposition of the two logical states. Any carefully controlled system obeying the laws of quantum mechanics can be used to form a qubit; popular choices are trapped ions, superconducting circuits and single particles of light, known as photons. However you choose to do it, changing how you compute at this fundamental level opens up new approaches to problems.

Are you ready to embrace quantum computing sooner rather than later? Well, whether you are ready or not, you have no choice but to accept it because this is what’s in store for us years from now.

Experts have suggested that quantum computers could break the toughest mainstream encryption strategies in use today; exponentially increased processing speed will eventually allow them to crack protocols that are currently too computationally difficult to unravel. The early commercial interest in quantum computing, though, focuses less on offense and more on helping beleaguered security analysts not just identify incidents, but decide which of those incidents represent an actual threat. IBM estimates that companies have to sift through 200,000 security events per day on average; that’s certainly more than a human team can dependably vet on their own, and generates enough data over time to challenge traditional computers.

While many are thrilled with the arrival of cloud computing, there are also some precautions we need to take and details we should be aware of.

The Internet of Things is no longer science fiction. If it’s not in your home already, it will be shortly, and IoT will only grow more pervasive in the coming years. Soon, just about every “thing” that exists will be connected to every other “thing.” That concept is incredibly exciting—and incredibly dangerous. Many of us are aware that online threats are pervasive, and result in devastating cyberattacks on governments, businesses and private citizens. What most people still don’t know is that, within the next 10 years, those attacks will become exponentially more difficult to prevent.

The reason: quantum computing. Tech giants, including Google, Microsoft and IBM, and governments around the world are all in a high-stakes race to introduce the first commercial, universal quantum computer. These incredibly powerful computers will introduce dramatic new opportunities in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, materials science, and drug creation. Industry consensus is that a universal commercial quantum computer capable of these advances will arrive by 2026 or sooner. Experimental quantum computers already exist.

The dark side of quantum computers is that they will have the power to subvert the classical encryption widely used to protect data today, creating widespread and potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities. As computing has evolved, encryption has been able to evolve with it, largely hand-in-hand. Both were based on incremental changes in power; computers got faster, and encryption was improved to keep pace. With the advent of quantum computing, that model no longer applies. Incremental changes won’t be adequate as the paradigm shifts from classical to quantum computing.

Like any other thing on this planet (whether living or not), quantum computing has its good and bad sides. Although we can never really tell when quantum computing will be made available to the public at large, it helps to know that it is just on the horizon. There is much to learn with a technology as complex as quantum computing but it is best that we cross the bridge when we get there. We will continue to ramp up our data recovery services (including options like http://www.harddriverecovery.org/SQL_database_recovery.html) as computers get better. Expect Hard Drive Recovery Group to be there no matter your data issue.